Collecting Overstreets

The last couple of Sunday Scans have featured Overstreet Price Guide covers. It’s kind of looking like the next few might be guide covers too! I’ve bought the Overstreet Comic-book Price Guides on and off over the last 30 years. I’ve bought more guides the last 5 years than the first 25. When I was a kid me and my buddies could never afford a Price Guide. They were about 10 bucks for the softcover version back then. We had never seen a hardcover until much later. At 10 bucks a copy there was no way we would buy one! That was ONE WHOLE WEEK worth of allowance money! One could buy about 15 regular new comics for that kind of money and even more from the local shop’s “20 cent box”. So when we wanted to know a value we would take turns calling that same shop and asking them for a “price” on any issues we were interested in knowing about. This got old rather fast for those poor shop employees! I remember one of them yelling at me over the phone: “guys we SELL PRICE GUIDES you know!!”. I was pretty sure they didn’t know who it was but I was still so embarrassed! Wasn’t too long after that one of our more “well off” friend’s actually broke down and bought a shiny new Overstreet softcover guide! I’m pretty sure it was #11 (1981) with a lurid pulp painted cover by LB Cole. We passed it around a bit and I remember being particularly enamored by that colorful cover with the demon, the bats and the poor tied-up blond trapped in a cave with the castle in the background.

Up until very recently all the Overstreets I had were always bought new for that year. But I started seeing a lot of old ones on eBay and other places and at first I thought -why buy an OLD Guide? The why for me turned out to be a couple of reasons -the beautiful covers & the fun interesting articles. Even the ads are fun to look through. It’s also pretty interesting to compare the values of the same comics across the years. This year’s guide (#45) has a “Guide to the Guides” where they show cover images for every single guide so far and values based on actual sales today. But like all Price Guides they are simply guides -a suggestion based on past performance. Great deals far below guide can be found with some skillful searching and a bit of luck. A week ago I scored my own copy in (TRUE MINT condition) of my personal “grail Overstreet” #11 for only $7.36 on eBay despite the official value being $85.00!